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Review
"The Quickening Maze confirms Foulds as one of the most interesting and talented writers of his generation."
— Peter Parker, The Times Literary Supplement
"This is a novel that sees its varied cast of compelling characters, all travelling their separate but interlocking journeys, as it sees the natural world-with a tender and scrupulous eye. What I love most about The Quickening Maze is its quietness, the silence that makes you lean in until you hear its lovely song."
— Nadeem Aslam
"Foulds's exceptional novel is like a lucid dream: earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic-the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach."
— Tom Gatti, The Times (UK)
"A remarkable and passionate book. The worlds it creates, the forest and the asylum, and the characters that inhabit them are drawn with a wonderfully strange poetic intensity. It is a wholly original vision, impossible to forget."
— Patrick McGrath
— Peter Parker, The Times Literary Supplement
"This is a novel that sees its varied cast of compelling characters, all travelling their separate but interlocking journeys, as it sees the natural world-with a tender and scrupulous eye. What I love most about The Quickening Maze is its quietness, the silence that makes you lean in until you hear its lovely song."
— Nadeem Aslam
"Foulds's exceptional novel is like a lucid dream: earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic-the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach."
— Tom Gatti, The Times (UK)
"A remarkable and passionate book. The worlds it creates, the forest and the asylum, and the characters that inhabit them are drawn with a wonderfully strange poetic intensity. It is a wholly original vision, impossible to forget."
— Patrick McGrath
Product Description
Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, The Quickening Maze centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum – an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen.
For John Clare, a man who had grown up steeped in the freedoms and exhilarations of nature, who thought ‘the edge of the world was a day’s walk away’, a locked door is a kind of death. This intensely lyrical novel describes his vertiginous fall, through hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness.
Historically accurate, but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates – the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Tennyson, the brutish staff and John Clare himself – are brought vividly to life. Outside the walls is Nature, and Clare’s paradise: the birds and animals, the gypsies living in the forest; his dream of home, of redemption, of escape. Rapturous yet precise, exquisitely written, rich in character and detail, this is a remarkable and deeply affecting book: a visionary novel which contains a world.
For John Clare, a man who had grown up steeped in the freedoms and exhilarations of nature, who thought ‘the edge of the world was a day’s walk away’, a locked door is a kind of death. This intensely lyrical novel describes his vertiginous fall, through hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness.
Historically accurate, but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates – the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Tennyson, the brutish staff and John Clare himself – are brought vividly to life. Outside the walls is Nature, and Clare’s paradise: the birds and animals, the gypsies living in the forest; his dream of home, of redemption, of escape. Rapturous yet precise, exquisitely written, rich in character and detail, this is a remarkable and deeply affecting book: a visionary novel which contains a world.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poets and Poems.,
By
This review is from: The Quickening Maze (Paperback)
"One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey and "The Quickening Maze" by Adam Folds are the two most captivating novels I ever read about mental patients and the persons who look after them.Foulds uses a poetical language and by poetry he tries to understand the intricate and illogical thoughts of some of the patients. He often describes nature also and uses that as a counterpart for the asylum. The infinite forest encloses the village and the asylum so that the asylum becomes a world on its own. An attempt to free one self as an individual is made impossible by the impenetrability of the forest. This symbolizes the inability of some patients ( one of the most important is the nature poet John Clare ) to understand their personal destiny. It's not that they don't see a goal in life, they just don't know how to reach it. In the first half of the novel you get bits and pieces of several stories, each of them standing on its own with no connection with the other parts of the novel. It's almost as the language of a schizophrenic who takes pieces of several thoughts and brings them together to form a mangled and incomprehensible language. But as the novel continues everything begins to fall into place to form a story-line and a question: where is the borderline between the sane and the insane? Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, 'The Quickening Maze' centers on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr. Matthew Allen.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Impossible to follow and boring,
By
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This review is from: The Quickening Maze (Paperback)
I'll have to remind myself to skip the Man Booker finalists,, this book was impossible to finish and I finally gave up about 3/4 through. There are two or more storylines, one where the people are crazy and the other about the family, you never really learn anything about any of the characters.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A delightful journey,
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This review is from: The Quickening Maze (Hardcover)
Foulds plays around with Tennyson and his acquaintance with a man who runs an asylum and would like very much to do something else. Of course we learn something about the people in the asylum and the lines are predictably blurred between their experience and those outside.
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